Domain Name Com's Software Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac (Intel Mac)

Software Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac (Intel Mac)

Domain Name Com's - Software : Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac (Intel Mac)

- Brilliant Idea; Abysmal Performance
Do not be fooled by the professional reviewers. Parallels 3 is a disaster for the average user. While they've got a lot right, the glitches are killers. My experience has been to put dozens of hours into attempting to get it to work correctly and finally having to abandon it due to regular crashes, difficulties using standard peripherals, and networking problems.

The promise of Parallels is compelling -- to be able to run Mac and Windows programs seamlessly on a Mac. It was this assurance, backed by positive magazine reviews, that I made the ultimately disastrous mistake when my wife and I recently needed new laptops of switching from PC to Mac.

For starters, Parallels is hardly easy or intuitive to set up. Phone tech support is $30 a pop (or by e-mail, where the answers are pat and do not adequately address your specific situation, and the lag time has averaged more than a week, not the promised 3 days, totally hanging me up several times). I am a relatively sophisticated user, but after exhausting every resource available to me (including paid tech support) and squandering many dozens of hours, the program still crashes my MacBook Pro or my wife's Airbook or turns the screen to gibberish (the only way out is to reboot, often losing the most recent data). We cannot get peripherals such as printers or external drives or external monitors to run reliably on both the Mac and Windows sides; same with networking, rendering the program worse than useless.

I sent an earlier draft of this review to Mr. John Rhoades, Director of Operations, hoping to get a rebuttal and to be shown how to overcome the glitches. He informed me that "threatening Parallels with 'bad mouthing' and poor reviews is a poor way to get our attention." Fair enough. However, as I wrote to him, I was not writing in the spirit of threatening, but simply "trying to determine if the program can run standard Windows programs and peripherals without undue problems, and if it can't (even though the company leads the customer to believe that it can), to responsibly warn fellow users to not expect that it can."

I offered to have their tech support team show me how to work out the problems, demonstrating that the program works as advertised. They did not respond again, which I assume means that they were not confident that they could work out the problems since the mention of a negative review did get their attention. My uses are fairly standard. No 3-D games, no video editing; just Office for Windows (I like it a lot more than Office for Mac), a windows e-mail program that has no equivalent in Mac, web surfing, and a few add-ons like a good thesaurus.

The current version is 3.0. My advice: wait for Ver 5, and only if they institute free tech support for the first month while you are setting it all up. Meanwhile, I am resorting to Boot Camp and the inconvenience of reboots to move between OS X and XP. Unexpected crashes and the inability to use peripherals are far more inconvenient.

Rating:

- Parallels 3.0 not so hot
Parallels installed without difficulty on my iMac Leopard, but after that, the trouble began. Peripherals and downloads proved difficult, if not impossible. I was so turned off, I uninstalled it and went back to Boot Camp. My Windows xp works fine now, and so does my Leopard.

Rating:

- Great when it works
Easy installation and it runs better than my old Windows machine. However, I have a brand new Mac and it is quriky about opening, sometimes refusing for several tries. Overall, it makes the Windows on Mac experience just great.

Rating:

- I don't need my old PC anymore!
I was little concerned about the performance and stability of this product with reviews I've read online. I agree that for most games it simply will not work yet, but if you are just looking for a business applications solution, this works fantastic. I set it up to work with my Boot Camp partition so that way I can reboot into Windows when necessary to play games (such as Gametap). Otherwise, I can use my regular business applications while in MAC OS. So far I've used Microsoft Office 2007 and Money 2007 without issue. It's very responsive and I love the coherence mode.

Rating:

- A lot of work
This is not an extensive review, so by all means read the others. I rarely have a need to run a Windows application. I don't even like seeing the desktop and on a Mac it's just plain wrong. Parallels 3 is a pretty good add-on if you do need an occasional Windows app. I use a first gen MacBook Pro 1.83 Core Duo and it had 1 GB of memory at the time. It ran slow but thats not a big deal. It kept getting errors to the point that it wouldnt open and I have reinstalled a couple of times. I'm tired of doing that. Also, I got in a bind and purchased a tech support call. You go thru a third party type process to pay for it and at the end it dumps you out in the street. IT DOESNT TELL YOU HOW TO CONTACT SUPPORT AND USE THE CALL YOU JUST PAID FOR. Of course no one called me back and I had to send several emails just to ask them how to use the paid tech support call. This is bad bad business and is downright immoral. They finally called me back and acted like it was no big deal. The call solved my problem - for a while. Currently its not working.

All in all, when it does work, it does it's job. I just wish I could keep it working. Maybe the next version will be better. The support alone should give it a one star, but I'm feeling generous and want the product to succeed. It's kind of like a bathroom plunger. It's disgusting to use but sometimes you have to. The handle on this one is too short.

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